Fortinet To Bolster ADC Play With Coyote Point Buy

Fortinet announced Friday plans to acquire Coyote Point Systems, a privately held maker of application delivery control (ADC) and load balancing solutions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Fortinet said the move will round its broader network security play with ADC, a market the company says is projected to exceed $2 billion in 2013. It will also bolster Fortinet's own array of ADC solutions, which fall under its FortiBalancer balancer and are aimed at small enterprises and cloud service providers.

"Fortinet customers will benefit in that they will now have access to state-of-the-art load balancing and ADC solutions," said Fortinet spokesperson Rick Popko in an emailed comment to CRN. "In particular, customers with data centers will benefit by having a wider array of competitive solutions to evaluate and implement as part of their data center infrastructure and security architecture."

The move could also allow Fortinet to see more eye-to-eye with ADC market leader F5 Networks, along with Citrix and Cisco, which joined forces in October to integrate Citrix's NetScaler ADC with various Cisco network and security technologies.

Coyote Point CEO Bill Kish suggested the deal will allow for new investments to be made in Coyote Point's ADC technology that might not have been possible otherwise.

"While Coyote Point has built a top class ADC product portfolio and loyal customer base, there has always been a trade off around resources," Kish said in a statement. "We look forward to being a member of the Fortinet family and the opportunity to make strategic technology investments in our ADC platform."

Fortinet said it will not make any immediate changes to Coyote Point's products, customer support or channel program, or to its own existing ADC line-up.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.